Master and Commander
by Trench Kamen
Summary: Seras's reflections on Alucard's and Integral's relationship after Integral's death. One-shot short fic.


I do not own Hellsing or any of its characters, first off, as we are all well familiar with the disclaimers.

This was a quick one-shot idea I wrote one afternoon. It is depressing. There is not much of a point.

It is just an idea that came to mind.

-------------------

Immortality is lonely.

Master warned me about that when he first gave me my second life, my undead life. I do not remember his exact words, but it was the feeling I got. It may have been in his eyes. Master communicates a lot of things through his eyes. This is why he always wears those dark glasses, I guess, other than the practical use of shielding his eyes from the sun. Master does not like to reveal what he is thinking.

Then again, now that I think about it, his eyes are an enigma. There are times when I can clearly read his loneliness, and then there are times when they are perfect shields. If the eyes are the window to the soul, his are often slammed shut with reddened curtains, only sometimes showing a glimpse of the shadows beyond.

I told Sir Integral my analogy once. She told me never to be a writer.

The thought of Sir hurts right now. The wounds from her death are still fresh in my heart. My black dress still hangs in my musty closet, damp from the rain at her funeral. It has not even dried yet.

It always rains at funerals. Especially in London.

I feel terrible for Master. He has been around far, far longer than I have. He has seen this before. But if I may be so bold to venture, he has not been effected this profoundly by somebody's death. I know that he and Sir were lovers. At first I was depressed beyond compare, but now I know that Master and I would never have much of a relationship anyway. At least he calls me by my proper name at times. He still calls me "Police Girl" to be obnoxious and abrasive most of the time.

Watching people lower Sir into the ground was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do, next to watching my father be lowered into the same cemetery and watching all of my precious comrades die my first year with Hellsing.

Sir lived for a long time. She was ninety-three when she finally died in her bed one morning. Master Alucard was the only person with her at the time. I do not know what their last words were, but Master's voice was deceptively calm and quiet. I was hiding outside the door, leaning my head against the wood and half-listening to the murmurs. It grew quiet after a while.

Vampires have the ability to sense life leaving a body from a distance, especially if that life-force is dear to one' s heart. I felt Sir Integral die, slip away from her long-pressing illness that she fought for so long and cease to exist. There is an empty feeling that presides and that will never leave a body after that experience. I know. I felt the same emptiness with Walter forty years ago.

But that time was a little different because Master, though I know he was upset, merely shrugged and gave me the answer "Immortality is lonely. We watch humans be born, we watch them grow up, we watch them die. Get used to it." This time Master is upset and depressed. I'm scared. I have never seen Master so forlorn.

Life is poignant and ironic. Most of the time it is without drama or luster, just another "Hey, go do this", "We have more cleaning up to do," that sort of an existence. Even we who live around death daily, taking lives ourselves and seeing the aftermath of attacks on humans, live with a cynical outlook after a while. It's just another day, just another pack of idiots who want to play soldier or "immortal god".

But every now and then something happens that depresses me, and I remember what I was like before I became jaded. There was a time when I lived with passion for everything that I did and wanted to become. I miss that existence. I was far more vulnerable at that time, but I know it was worth it.

Immortality is lonely. And long.

What I realized a long, long time ago is this: we vampires are alive in the most important ways. Though are bodies are dead, our souls are living, feeling pain and loss, loving, doubting, knowing joy and sorrow, knowing boredom and detachment. Yes, even Master.

I can't stand to see Master like this.

Oh, on the outside to the casual observer he's fine. It's just another Hellsing head down and another coming to power that he must serve. He's seen it all before. Hell, he even smirks because though he is bound to the Hellsings he will outlast them all. They are temporary. He is eternal.

That is the outside story, at least. There are things that he does not say, but they are on his mind -- things like how Integral was the last pure Hellsing because she never had an heir. Master is dead; he cannot sire children. His seed is dead with him, if you want to be blunt. But if he and Integral had a child there would be a can of worms resulting from Sir having a child, not being married, and that child being a vampire, no less. The knights are rather stiff-necked with their own kind. They wouldn't give her so much gruff about it if she weren't a woman, I wager.

The day that Sir died Master walked out of the room carrying her body. I was almost stepped on when he opened the door. I fell into the room and right underneath him. He just stepped over me with his burden. Sir's family was all aligned and awaiting her death; they had been planning to join her for her last moments, but they mistimed.

You know, there are days when I think that Sir purposefully died without the extended family standing around and making a scene. She would have thought it was thoroughly wasteful. Alucard was all she needed to leave the world in peace.

Unfortunately, the family did not see the simple logic in this. They attacked Master, cursed him and accused him of sucking out Sir's last drops of blood out of spite and malice. Master merely kept his hold on the body and walked through the crowd to the coffin they had prepared and laid out in the third floor living room, where he laid the body and then disappeared into the wall.

It was a month before he came out.

He appeared at the funeral, an obligatorily dramatic, brooding presence on the outskirts of the crowd. He changed his carmine coat, hat, tie – everything but his gloves – black. They have not gone back to red since.

Why the funeral took a month to commence? The idiot relatives had to argue about everything under the sun -- what was proper for the coffin shape and for the funeral arrangements, what was proper for a "virgin" lady to wear (who was also a knight) in her coffin, which plot in the family tract was appropriate. I wanted to clutch my head and scream at them all to shut up, that it didn't matter, that wonderful, strong, brave Sir Integral Wingates Hellsing was dead and all they were doing was going through formalities like it was some sort of a mindless pre-ceremonial ritual dance performed to keep the audience entertained at a formal dinner. Something about it sickened me. Most of these relatives never knew Sir, thought of her as a batty old lady who held onto her position as head of the Hellsing Organization until her death. Most of them were relieved that she was gone. 

They never knew the Sir that I saw in my mind when I heard her name, the true Sir, young, energetic, the ice queen with hidden fire in her veins. The Sir that stood up to Catholic priests twice her height to look them straight in the eye until they were the ones to lower their heights to adjust to her own. The Sir who single-handedly commanded operations when everybody else was dying and falling apart around her. Abnormally tall, eyes and hair with almost no pigmentation as a contrast to her dark skin, always wearing men's suits that hid the finer details of her figure, white gloves, glasses, clenched her fists when she walked, smoked perfumed cigars that were without the horridly offensive odor of the big ones. Leader and knight, master and commander.

I am worried about Master.

Master and Commander. Master and Commander. Alucard and Integral. There is something about them that reminds me of a love affair between a demon and the huntress. There was a time when it was still young.

I don't like to think of Master as old.

Hell, I'm almost a hundred now.

Sometimes, late at night, when I was younger, I used to imagine what their love affair must have been like, slowly progressing from their hidden kisses to (with proportionately growing boldness in my thoughts) their nights together in bed. I found it sweet and comforting to think that even they would be smiling and doing tender things like nuzzling and brushing hair out of one another's faces in the afterglow of whatever-the-hell-it-was-they-just-did. Then my thoughts progressed into that 'whatever-the-hell' area, which grew more and more torrid and blunt with time and, surprisingly, my face stopped turning the shades of Master's coat when my thoughts wandered into this area.

I suppose it is so easy to think of Master's affair with Sir because, on some level, I once had a crush on her. I still think that I am attracted to men, but she was the one exception, and one cannot blame me, you must admit. If there are two people that one loves loving one another, it is so much easier to accept and love than if there is one person that you love loving somebody that you see as not-that-great, mediocre, or just another face in the crowd like you. I would be sick with jealousy if Master were having an affair with a normal, feminine girl. I guess that's why it's so easy for women to love stories of two men in love, because there is no jealousy. Unless you're Sir. Don't tell her I said that, though I do not think she would care.

I see both her and Master in a light of worship in awe. The deserve each other. They truly were a dangerous pair, a lioness and a hunting dog. 

At least I have Master. Though, it would be nice if he would come out of the wall every once in a while. I know that he wishes that he would have held Sir down, bitten her and given her eternal life no matter how much she protested so that he would always have her by his side. 

But it is too late. Not even a No-Life-King can change the past.

He could have done this when she was young, and she would be here right now, smoking cigars and annoying the living hell out of the family members who just wanted her to die and leave her inheritance. 

No, she probably would have been exiled again, this time with her family disowning her, and we would all move out to a shack in the English countryside with the most advanced computer equipment and all of Walter's gunsmithing tools. And it would be a one room house in which I could _hear_ the whatever-the-hell on some quiet nights. Walter, of course, would listen to headphones and pretend to notice nothing.

…immortality is so lonely. In the end, all one has is herself.

But I can't help but believe in eternal friendship, no matter how much Master tells me that it does not exist.


End file.
